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Steel Arm Davis

American baseball player

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 2, 2026
Entity authorityQ7605628 ↗
Source-derived summary

Walter C. "Steel Arm" Davis (June 22, 1896 – November 30, 1941) was an American professional baseball outfielder, first baseman, pitcher, player-manager, and manager in the Negro leagues and the Cuban League from 1920 to 1938. He played for the Dayton Marcos, Detroit Stars, Chicago American Giants, Nashville Elite Giants, Gilkerson's Union Giants and Brooklyn Eagles.

During the off-season, Davis often returned to his hometown of Madison, Wisconsin, and worked as a porter for many of the local barber shops.

In the later years of his career, Davis worked as a player-manager for the Black Missions baseball team in San Antonio, Texas. The traveling team followed the same traditions of many other barnstorming baseball teams, playing as far away as Canada, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas and North Dakota. The team also staged exhibitions with Grover Cleveland Alexander when he was with House of David baseball team during summer 1938.

Known to have a hot temper, Davis was shot and killed by "Red" Merrill after a 1941 barroom brawl in Chicago. Merrill was later captured by police.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Steel Arm Davis” is american baseball player. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Steel, Davis and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1896, 1941, 1920, 1938—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1891. For this dossier, Steel, Davis and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american baseball player” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7605628. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1896, 1941, 1920 and 1938.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Steel Arm Davis”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Steel Arm Davis primary sources, Steel Arm Davis archive and Steel research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Steel Arm Davis”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Steel Arm Davis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.